Life, Death and Oil in 'Syriana'

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

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"Syriana" is a devastating tapestry of life, death and the business of Middle East Oil. Based on the book by former CIA agent Bob Baer, it offers a complex view of this era of peak oil consumption and Persian Gulf wars. It makes complicit oil executives, the Arab ruling elite and U.S. government operatives and assassins who all work hand-in-hand to ensure that business continues to run as usual—to the benefit of the United States.

The plot unfolds through a series of separate but interlocking stories: Bob Barnes (George Clooney) is a burned out and betrayed CIA operative; Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) is a DC-based corporate attorney overseeing the messy merger of two oil giants; Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) is a financial adviser whose company wants to land the ruling royal family as clients. Their stories, spliced together, are presented through key moments, conversations and tragedies.

The interlocking of the stories adds to the film’s emphasis on a machine, a machine that functions well by everyone doing their job. In the process of everyone doing their job and getting paid, questions of right and wrong, legality, morality and principal are subordinate to the machine and mission. A prince of a Gulf royal family (Alexander Siddig), for example, who wants to improve economic conditions in his country for the average citizen, implement true democracy and give women equal rights, is suddenly labeled an enemy of the system when he accepts a bid from the Chinese instead of the Americans for coveted natural gas drilling rights. "Syriana" has Washington, D.C. painted to scary perfection. Watch the CIA agent go home to his cookie-cutter suburban home, perhaps in Virginia, unload the screaming kids from the mini-van, and then, in the next scene, order an assassination.

Director and writer Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for "Traffic," gives the sense of events unfolding in real time, as if we are watching a close-up documentary. Because of its sense of real time, it is not an action-packed film in the typical Hollywood sense. There are many moments of suspense and quick violence that propel the story and tension forward. It is not sentimental yet it does offer empathy for all of its main characters and for the destroyed lives of children and young men.

And yet, for all of its complexity, "Syriana" leaves much unsaid, unseen and unexplained. Holiday comes home everyday to his nice brick town home and, typically, his father is sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette, looking like a wino. The father never says much of anything. We know he is in a sad state, he might be homeless except for his son offering him a place to sleep every night. But we don’t learn anything personal about him—or about his son for that matter.

The cumulative sense offered is that, in the machine, individual details such as family are truly secondary, and that in this cut-throat world of oil, either you are a player or you do not—or will not—exist.

This review also appeared on www.BET.com. Esther Iverem’s new book of poems, Living in Babylon, is available at through SeeingBlack.com’s store at Amazon.com.

— December 13, 2005

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